OpenAI’s video-generating app Sora has had a very successful start. It received 627,000 downloads on iOS in its first week, while ChatGPT had 606,000 when it debuted, TechCrunch reports, citing Appfigures statistics.
However, a direct comparison is not entirely correct: ChatGPT was only available in the US at launch, while Sora was immediately available in both the US and Canada. If we consider only American users, Sora's launch was about 96% of ChatGPT's launch performance.
Importantly, Sora is invite-only, while ChatGPT was open to everyone from the start. Despite this, the app managed to break into the top three in the US App Store on its first day, and by early October it was at number one. This rapid growth gave it a better showing than other AI app launches, including Anthropic’s Claude and Microsoft’s Copilot, and put it on par with xAI’s Grok.
Videos created in Sora using the Sora 2 model, which allows for realistic deepfakes, have quickly gone viral on social media. Users are even recreating images of dead people.
According to Appfigures, Sora's highest daily downloads reached 107.8k on October 1, 2025. Since then, downloads have fluctuated between 84.4k and 98.5k per day. For an app that is still limited in access, this is an impressive number.